page_title: Skype a Scientist
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Skype a Scientist / History
caption_attribution_description: English: A selfie of squid biologist and science communicator Dr Sarah McAnulty, founder and executive director of Skype a Scientist
context_page_description: Skype a Scientist is a nonprofit educational organization based in Willimantic, Connecticut that enables scientists to video conference with students in classrooms. It began as an informal program in 2017, founded by Sarah McAnulty while she was a graduate student at the University of Connecticut. As of 2019, almost 15,000 classrooms and over 7,000 scientists from a total of 43 countries had participated in video conferencing sessions.
context_section_description: Sarah McAnulty came up with the idea for Skype a Scientist in 2016 while she was a graduate student in molecular and cell biology at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. Inspiration for the program came from the growing distrust of scientists and the rise of anti-intellectualism in US society. McAnulty was concerned that scientists were portrayed in media as "cold and calculating" and aimed to connect people with scientists through video conferencing to dispel those stereotypes, and to "get people trusting scientists again".
  In 2017, McAnulty matched volunteer scientists with teachers and classrooms by hand using a Google spreadsheet, which she shared repeatedly on Twitter and Tumblr. She collected information from scientists and teachers and matched them based on their time zones and type of scientist requested if available. As the program grew, McAnulty recruited her childhood friend, David Jenkins, a graduate student in bioinformatics at Boston University, to write an algorithm that could match scientists with classrooms automatically. 
  As of 2020, Skype a Scientist is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit, registered as part of Sarah Mack Scicomm, Inc.
caption: Sarah McAnulty
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